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Every day in Mumbai 5,000 dabbawalas (literally translated as "those who carry boxes") distribute a staggering 200,000 home-cooked lunchboxes to the city’s workers and students. Giving employment and status to thousands of largely illiterate villagers from Mumbai's hinterland, this co-operative has been in operation since the late nineteenth century. It provides one of the most efficient delivery networks in the world: only one lunch in six million goes astray.

Feeding the City is an ethnographic study of the fascinating inner workings of Mumbai's dabbawalas. Cultural anthropologist Sara Roncaglia explains how they cater to the various dietary requirements of a diverse and increasingly global city, where the preparation and consumption of food is pervaded with religious and cultural significance. Developing the idea of "gastrosemantics" – a language with which to discuss the broader implications of cooking and eating – Roncaglia's study helps us to rethink our relationship to food at a local and global level.

Appendix: Theory and Practice for an Ethnography of Diversities DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0031.05

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Index

Sara Roncaglia is a cultural anthropologist. She has worked as a cultural consultant for ethnographic projects that led researches for the Italian National Railways, as well as working with workers of a Barilla factory in Southern Italy. Currently Sara's research is focusing on the cultural dynamics of food and the anthropology of work; her projects in the past ten years have been dedicated to researching identities and practices within the workplace, focusing on the mix of cultural differences and social stratification.In 2011 she co-founded AVoce; a non-profit organisation that promotes historical-anthropological research within work, companies and territory.

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported Licence. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing the work is not translated or altered and the following author and publisher attribution is clearly stated:

Sara Roncaglia, Feeding the City: Work and Food Culture of the Mumbai Dabbawalas. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2013, http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0031

Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders; any omissions or errors will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. Please see the list of illustrations below:

1. Percentage distribution of Bombay population classified by religion, 1881–1931. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 31
2. Percentage distribution of population classified by language spoken, Bombay, 1911–1931. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 33
3. Picture of Madhu Havji Bacche. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge
4. Dabbawalas and their customers, 1900–2003. Chandrasekhar, Ramasastry, Dabbawallahs of Mumbai, Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, 2004, available at http://beedie.sfu.ca/files/PDF/mba-new-student-portal/2011/MBA/Dabbawallahs_of_Mumbai_(A).pdf [accessed 28 October 2012], p. 17
5. Mumbai. Flyer informing customers that the service will be suspended for four days for the annual festival celebrating the birth of Mahavira, the spiritual teacher of Jainism. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge
6. The culinary triangle, Mumbai style. From Sara Roncaglia, Nutrire la città (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2010), p. 148. By kind permission of Bruno Mondadori
7. Diagram by Pawan G. Agrawal, director of Mumbai’s Agrawal Institute of Management. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge
8. Client agreement form. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge
9. Dabbawala Costs Managing. Ramasastry Chandrasekhar, Dabbawallahs of Mumbai, Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, 2004, available at http://beedie.sfu.ca/files/PDF/mba-new-student-portal/2011/MBA/Dabbawallahs_of_Mumbai_(A).pdf [accessed 28 October 2012]
10. The Flow Logic. Diagram by Pawan G. Agrawal, Director of Mumbai Agrawal Institute of Management. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge
11. Examples of dabba symbols. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge
12. The dabba coding system evolution. Diagram by Pawan G. Agrawal, director of Mumbai Agrawal Institute of Management. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge
13. The dabba coding current system. Diagram by Pawan G. Agrawal, director of Mumbai Agrawal Institute of Management. By kind permission of Raghunath Medge

CHAPTER
1

In the first chapter I explain how food can play a
key role in such practices and how understanding the way food is processed and
signified can help us gain a better grasp of current issues pertaining
globalization and diversity.

CHAPTER
2

In the second chapter I studied the cultural,
historical and economic relationships between the city of Bombay/Mumbai and the
Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust: the city provided the dinamic
stage for the birth of this system of food distribution, a local cooperative
that offers a sustainable way to feed the city in accord with traditional
values. For the dabbawala, theirs is not just a job, a viable way to survive
for workers that are mostly poor and illiterate people: it is their profession.

CHAPTER
3

In the third chapter I describe how religion, caste
and ideology have converged to generate meaning, ascribing peculiar values to
Indian food. I employed a gastrosemantics-oriented approach, exploring how
culture makes use of food to signify, comprehend, classify, philosophize and
communicate. I strived to offer a description of the complex relationships that
link this process of cultural semantification of food with day-to-day practices
of sacrality, with the daily life of Indian women, and finally with extant
caste-related hierarchies in a huge Indian metropolis such as Mumbai.

CHAPTER
4

In the fourth chapter I describe the organizational
structure of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust: its operational
guidelines, its generational turnover, the logistics of distribution, the
delivery process and the technical solutions that make it extraordinarily
efficient against considerable odds. Simple devices, such as the signs drawn on
the dabba in order to aid specify the recipient’s location, or more complex
ones, such as the use of the railway network as a sort of mind map, allowing
the dabbawalas to establish a symbolic and material rapport with this megacity
of 19 million inhabitants.

CONCLUDING
CHAPTER

I devoted my concluding chapter to the unraveling
of the tight relationship that links the entire system of preparing and
distributing the dabbas to the cultural processes of nutritional transformation
affecting Bombay-Mumbai. I tried to trace this relationship back to what makes
Bombay a global city. One key aspect is the eating habits and value systems
ascribed to food by the many different migrant groups that make up the city’s
population. The ongoing acculturation process that accompanies this continuous
inflow of migrants of very diverse origin has lent the city its characteristic
nutritional phisionomy. One can recognize it in the diversity of cuisines and
dining practices. Yet as the shift from Bombay to Mumbai progressed over time,
a change heavily charged with symbolic cultural connotations, tensions among
different minorities and local communities have risen and have been worsened by
a growing ethnicization of the social landscape. Collective rights are claimed
on the grounds of identity and affiliation to particular castes, regional origins
or language groups. Mumbai has become the stage for bloody ethnic and religious
clashes, and groups involved usually consider food the prime marker of
differentiation and separation. Food has thus come to express distinctions and
rivalries that were indeed, to some extent, already a given within the Indian
cultural tradition, but that have nowadays been allowed to spin into open overt
political hostility and outright violence. On this merciless new mumbaite
stage, the Other is subject to a kind of cultural cannibalism, as each and
every social group aspires to an exclusive monopoly of power and culture. I
examine these dynamics of conflict and change by proposing the concept of
foodscape, a comprehensive approach to global symbolic and material shifts concerning
food itself, food cultures and nutritional practices. Using the foodscape as
interpretive paradigm, the dabbawala’s case helps us understand how taste – the
discerning and distinctive aspect in any food-related practice – is becoming a
key factor of cultural transformation worldwide. Taste is thus conceived not
merely as a sensory impulse, but as a signifier, a cultural construct that is
socially engineered to transform and lend new meaning to the world one
inhabits.